And Clarence Greene was the other writer / producer in this independent production, released through United Artists, which contains a powerful racial text for small town America.
A little black girl falls down a well, the family report it to detective Richard Rober, a man who has talked to her is identified and caught - he's Henry Morgan. His uncle is the local business bigwig Roy Engel, tries to get him out unsuccessfully, is then harassed by two members of the missing girl's family, which ends up looking like assault... And that sets off a horrible chain reaction of false rumours and interracial violence which is really quite nasty.
But then the girl is found, and the community is united in the rescue attempts to dig her out, something of a laborious process for the film and the audience, with lots of phallic equipment being pummelled about.
Only recognisable names behind the camera are Ernest Laszlo and Dmitri Tiomkin. The sound track is amusingly awful when scenes go from having sound track to none. The copy we saw was of a dubious bootlegged nature with pretty silver track marks and ambient splodges.
Features one of those "It's quiet out here - too quiet" moments.
Christine Larson is the spunky diner lady -
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| "OK - which one of you's next?" |
Maidie Norman (Susan Slept Here, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Airport 77) and Ernest Anderson (In This Our Life; and uncredited in both Palm Beach Story and North by Northwest as railway porters) are the girl's parents.
And I'd like to think it was a final, classy touch to depict Morgan as a black man at the end!
A rather rare film now.
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